Thanksgiving has been an official holiday since the days of George Washington, who, in 1789, issued the first proclamation of Thanksgiving to honor the new national constitution. During the early 19th century, numerous states began to observe Thanksgiving on their own, setting different dates state by state. In the 1860s, Mrs. Sarah J. Hale, editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, mounted a vigorous campaign for a national Thanksgiving Day to be on the same date each year, coast to coast. ( Leave it to a woman for sense and sensibilities.) This gained presidential attention, and subsequently, on October 3 of 1863, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday of November as a National Day of Thanksgiving. We celebrated the official holiday together as a nation on November 26, 1863. For the next seventy years, each U.S. President issued his own proclamation confirming the date. Then, in 1939, finally Franklin D. Roosevelt re-set the day as November’s third Thursday. And then in 1941, a resolution...